Tyburn, the ideal Big Brother set?

Published on Sunday 22 June 2008 20:15

TV review

Tony Robinson's Crime And Punishment, Channel 4, Sunday

How TV Changed Britain, Channel 4, Friday

OCCASIONALLY, anti-TV campaigners will solemnly point out that the average person will see however many thousand violent acts if they watch for a certain length of time (and doubtless just as many boring Big Brother 'scandals'), thus warping us all into sociopaths. But at least the violence is mostly fake: in the late-18th century, the average person could see, in their lifetime, some 1,200 people actually killed right in front of them at the hugely popular public executions.

That grisly fact was relayed by Tony Robinson in the last part of his Crime And Punishment series, which took the story of the development of the rule of British law up to the start of the system as we know it today. In the Georgian era, judges were "dishing out death sentences like there was no tomorrow" for almost all crimes, large and small.

And the public were so numbed to it that watching a hanging – or 24, which could be done all at one time on Tyburn's state-of-the-deadly-art gallows – was regarded as a fun activity, almost a family day out, with fashionable society joining the hoi polloi at the biggest ones which could attract as many as 20,000 gawkers.

It's strange to imagine, now, when we shield ourselves and our children from the very sight of death. It's not so very long ago and people weren't so very different (a look at, say, Samuel Pepys' diary proves that), but somehow they didn't have the instinctive horror that we'd feel now – at least most of us. There are always the bloodthirsty who respond to every awful crime with a fervent pledge that they'd string up the perpetrator themselves quite happily and then have their breakfast.

Professor Vic Gatrell, an expert on 18th-century crime, told Robinson that: "This was the most deep psychological experience available… there was nothing like it." But the reason for the sudden rise of hangings was more practical: a rising gulf between rich and poor making the former insecure about losing their property to those with nothing to lose, the lack of a police force and of regular prisons. They couldn't transport everyone, so they killed hundreds for what seem now like minor offences.

The frenzy died down as 'bobbies' and jails came in, but the rise of political movements like the Chartists, demanding a voice for the majority, were soon a main target. Robinson's intent in this series has been avowedly political, aiming to show the way that 'law' has never been a neutral force in Britain but served the interests of the powerful. Using modern parallels – the Tony Martin case, the Miners' Strike – he tried to show that we're still dealing with many of the same issues.

It was distracting, though, to see him dress up as an 18th-century poacher, with rags and blackened face, as I kept waiting to hear his cunning plan. Instead, he sermonised: "We all want laws to protect us, but if we take our eye off the ball, they can all too easily be used to control us."

Crime And Punishment may not be a series that changed the world, but Property Ladder and Location, Location, Location did – at least according to How TV Changed Britain, a glorified clip show which claimed that "property porn" shows have created the current overheated housing market. Well, TV producers certainly would like to think that everyone hangs on their every programme, but if that were so, EastEnders would have made washing machines unfashionable, Taggart would have deterred most murderers and Delia would have got everyone making cakes from frozen potato.